With their pill-box hair,
tomato red lipstick that Elvis would have kissed,
and melon breasts bursting
the ribs of their pointed bras,
our mothers circle the table
and cheer with frozen laughter.

My chest rocks on Mother's arm.
She hoists me up like a feather
balanced on a scale
to the sugared menagerie
where stallions gallop the polo field.
Marshmallow cheeks
and wide eyes blazing,
I smother teary birthday candles
with one puff.
Six wax pillars wrap the camera in smoke.
It's all there in black and white.

The maids, our real mothers
melt like shadows on the walls,
their wild gypsy hair
hides in shame
under the dusty scarves of Islam.

Our fathers are out in the garden
squatting on silk rugs
around a sapphire pool of gold fish.
They're smoking and cackling politics,
sucking Darjeeling tea
through melting sugar cubes
juggled on their tongues.

Behind the gray gate
with two white swans,
the one-hundred-year old gardener,
once a Cossack soldier,
casts opium bubbles swirling
in the glass belly
of his water pipe.

His two half-Russian brats scream
when Laurel and Hardy squeeze out of the projector.
The Samovars rock like steam engines
sweating leaves brewed for fifty.

I turned six hovering that cake,
in February 1959,
when Persian mountains were covered with black-eyed poppies
and blind poets who played violins.

My picture still shines,
but father is gone,
mother is eighty,
and the country folded to a prayer.

Eisenhower had an affair
with his woman driver.
It's all there in black and white.